Fiction
The Host
This is the first time. Maman has tried to smuggle me off to Mass a few times, but Papa always intervenes. “Look at what all that ritualised hysteria has done to you,” he says, and Maman glances down at her toes, at her knees, at her stomach, all the way up to her chest, as if she were expecting to see the black mark of Catholicism imprinted on her body. Then she laughs and puts one hand on his cheek: “I haven’t been in thirty years. It would be nice for Sylvie to see what it’s like, just once.” But Papa always convinces her to wait, because attending a mass would mess with my delicate developingbrain, and he doesn’t see the bloody point anyhow.
Until yesterday. Maman said: “She’s
seven years old, she can handle it. She reads Proust, for Christ’s sake.”
I think Papa is tired. He has just finished putting up the Christmas lights
outside our house and is sitting in front of the fire with a scotch, and all
he says is “Fine. Just this once. But if Bibles start popping up around
the house, there’ll be hell to pay.” Papa is German and pronounces
certain letters differently than Maman and me. He is very self-conscious about
it and tries to avoid words with excessive amounts of “o”s.
I never actually said I want to go to Mass. Maman gets excited about cultural
experiences and drags Papa and me along with her, like the time we went to
the gypsy market and a man dangled a live lobster in front of me and Maman
just laughed. I told Mathieu (my best friend) about this, but I told him that
I had laughed too, instead of screaming, which is what I actually did.
Mathieu goes to church every other week. His parents aren’t actually religious but his father is the mayor of Gueugnon, so the entire family has to keep up certain facades of propriety. Mathieu was over at my house this afternoon, and when I told him that Papa had finally conceded to let me go to Christmas Midnight Mass, he explained everything to me so I would know what to do. He doesn’t go to Midnight Mass, but he said it would be the same as any other Mass. “It’s really easy,” he said, “just sit there and watch what everyone else does. You sing a bunch of songs, and then you have to drink some wine, and there’s this white paper thing you have to eat, and that’s about it. You’ll see, just follow everyone else.”
Mathieu is a conformist. Papa is an adamant non-conformist and this creates a certain amount of tension when Mathieu comes over to my house, because Papa will ask him rude rhetorical questions like “Are those new shoes you’ve got there? Those are the ones I’ve seen on all the boys your age, isn’t that right? Hum, hum hum.” And he’ll rub his chin as if he was trying to make a decision about something, but I know he’s already got his mind made up. Luckily Mathieu never notices, he just smiles and says, “Yes, sir! Aren’t they great? Look, they’ve got these cool blue stripes on the side.”
Sometimes Mathieu can be an idiot. One time we were playing tag barefoot and I stepped on a nail and my foot was gushing blood and he told me I was like Jesus. I told him there’s a lot more to being Jesus than having a bloody foot. There are the hands, for example. I saw a picture once. It was in this church I went to when my cousin got married; I was wandering around the hallways and saw a dark, shadowy painting of Jesus wearing a crown of thorns. His head was drooping down a little but his eyes were looking up, except that his eyelids were mostly closed. As I stood there staring at the painting, it seemed like his eyelids were flickering; I could see them flutter every time I looked at them. Mathieu says this means I am pure of spirit. He only thinks that because I’m the only one who doesn’t laugh in class when Pierre has to read aloud and accidentally repeats the word “d’yeux” three times.
After Mathieu leaves, Maman and Papa and I have Christmas dinner at seven. Maman is a terrible cook so Papa makes potato gratin and Maman washes the dishes, and I help out with both. It’s nice when we’re all in the kitchen and the steam from the hot water and warm food fogs up the windows and Papa’s glasses, and the snow falling outside is so generic that I could be anyone, anytime, anywhere.
We leave at eleven forty-five to go Midnight Mass, and I’ve never stayed up this late besides one night last month when Papa was on a business trip and Maman got too drunk on Benedictine to cook us dinner so I tried but I burnt everything and had to spend hours cleaning the kitchen up. We pass others on our way to the church, but I don’t recognise anyone because Papa doesn’t like us to fraternise with loonies. They wear long woolen coats and dark hats and all look distinguished, like English people in movies, with smooth skin and firm eyes. Papa doesn’t say a thing the whole time, he just stares at his shoes while Maman smiles at everyone we pass, and even says hi to people I’ve never seen before. There is a long stream of black coats and hats wriggling towards the bright, warm church at the end of the street, and I get a funny image of everyone going in and their coats turning a vibrant yellow once they go in the door.
I don’t care much for the priest. His voice
is crackly and I keep wanting to run up and give him a glass of water, but
of course I don’t. Instead, I scan the programme to see what songs we’ll
be singing and I look them all up in the hymnal. Then I look at the decorations,
the green felt bows at the end of each pew, and the red banners behind the
priest, and the candles on the altar making flickering shadows on the wall.
There are sconces along the edges of the high vaulted ceiling. Everyone is
looking at the priest except for a little girl who is playing with the straps
of her patent leather shoes. When we start singing I immediately know which
song it is because I’ve marked each one in the hymnal, and I’ve
never heard it but after a verse or two I can figure it out and I sing so
loudly that the man in front of me turns around and winks.
When everyone gets up and forms a line in front of the priest, Papa takes
his head in his hands and rubs his eyes with the tips of his fingers. I don’t
know what it’s all about but everyone is standing up, and I don’t
want to be caught next to Papa who is groaning, and Maman who is humming to
herself, so I stand up to get in line. Papa tries to catch me but I squiggle
past him and when I look back, Maman is squeezing his arm and shaking her
head, but I can’t tell if it’s at me or at Papa. So I turn my
back to them and inch my way towards the priest, who is pressing his fingertips
to his forehead, sternum, and each shoulder, and back again, over and over.
Then I’m the first person in line and a fat man standing next to the priest hands me a golden chalice, and I take a sip because I remember what Mathieu told me. I never cared much for wine and my lips pucker impulsively. The priest looks at me quizzically and hands me a round white cracker. Mathieu said to eat it, but when I place it on my tongue it tastes like paper, so I take it out and conceal it in my hand. They can’t possibly expect me to eat paper. Maybe Papa is right, maybe they are all loopy.
I shuffle back to my pew and hold my hands in my lap, hoping that if I squeeze them in between my knees hard enough, the white paper will disappear. I can feel some people’s eyes on me, so I sit quietly on the bench and analyse the chessboard pattern of the stone tiles in the floor, feeling the paper dissolve slowly in my sweaty palm, until we have to pray.
I’ve never prayed before so I watch the man next to me first. He kneels on the red plush footrest in front of us and puts his palms together in front of his nose and closes his eyes, so I kneel down too, but then I remember the cardboard in my hand and have to hold my palms tight together so that it doesn’t slip down in between them. The priest intones: “Notre père qui êtes aux cieux…” and I remember the Jacques Prévert poem Pater noster, which starts “Notre père qui êtes aux cieux/ Restez-y…” – “Our Father who art in Heaven/ Stay there…” I start laughing and Maman nudges me in the side with her elbow.
When the priest is done intoning he is quiet, and the entire church is silent, and I see that the man next to me is moving his lips to form inaudible words, so he must be asking God his own personal questions. After three minutes we all get back up, rub our knees, and settle into our seats again. The man next to me keeps glancing sideways at me, I’m sure. He thinks I don’t notice but I do. He is watching my little fist, my knuckles striped with tension, as if his eyes were x-rays and he could see, through my trembling skin, the pasty lump nestled under my fingertips. I do not know what it is that I’ve done, but it must be something horrible, irredeemable, the Error of all Errors. The lump feels like it is expanding every time I fill my lungs.
The more I sit and wait for the end, the more I am sure that I will be struck down by God before I even leave the church. Mathieu told me once what happens to sinners. He said that they burn in hell for all eternity. But I am certain that my sin is so awful that God won’t wait until I die to punish me. I am so mesmerised by the image in my brain of God’s enormous hand coming down out of the ceiling to crush me between two fingers, rolling me back and forth like a cigarette, that I don’t notice the service is over. But it is not the hand of God that grips my shoulder as I get up to leave, it is the enormous hairy paw of the man next to me. He is taller than Papa and has a black moustache that twitches when he speaks. He says: “Open your fist.” Maman raises her eyes and clears her throat. “Excuse me?” she asks him, a little too politely. She doesn’t know her daughter is a criminal. She looks at me expectantly. I have no choice, I turn my fist over slowly and uncurl my fingers one by one, praying for the first time in my life, praying to the candles in the church and the wind raging outside, pleading without words for the sweaty white paste to have dissolved. But it is there for the world to see, my hideous sin, the mark of Catholicism slashed upon my palm like a lumpy scar. The moustache twitches. “That.” The eyes blink. “That is the body of Christ.”
I gulp. That’s why it tasted so bad. “That, right there in your hand, is the body of Christ.” Maman shrugs and squeezes my shoulder. “Sir, please excuse her, she didn’t know any better.” And she leads me away, quickly, and we dissolve into the crowd while the man pushes at people, trying to get at us, trying to take me away.
Papa picks me up and carries me back home. Maman walks in front of us, humming quietly, hands deep in her pockets and head craning up to look at the stars. I am sobbing; the snot and tears leave a dark oceanic stain on Papa’s coat and I am holding onto his shoulder so tight I can’t feel my fingers, and when I finally take my hand away I see that I have imprinted the white mush of Catholicism on his jacket; as a grotesquely reversed legacy I have passed my sin on to my father.
